LIVE AND DANGEROUS!

The Struts are Britain’s fastest-rising hard rock band, and for their new album Strange Days, they’ve pulled in some A-list guest stars including members of Rage Against The Machine, Def Leppard and The Strokes – and Robbie Williams. It was also recorded pretty much live in the studio, and as guitarist Adam Slack says, “It’s the most guitar-y album we’ve done!”

- Jonny Scaramanga

In 2020, a lot of musicians have had a lot of time on their hands, but for The Struts, ten days was all it took to cut one of the best rock records of the year. “It was essentially recorded live,” says guitarist Adam Slack of the band’s third album Strange Days, for which they decamped to producer John Levine’s home studio. And as Slack explains, it was a very different experience to making their 2018 breakthrough record Young & Dangerous.

“Usually, in the past, I’ve done like twenty guitar tracks, harmonies galore and all that,” he says. “But this time there’s one guitar track on every song, all one live take. I did some overdubs but I didn’t go crazy. John felt we should try and make it sound as much as you can like a live band. We didn’t even double-track. John added a tiny delay panned on the other side from the main guitar. He said that’s cooler because it’s what they would have done in the 70s.”

Recording in a pandemic meant Adam didn’t have his full live rig available. “I did use a Kemper on some of the overdubs but the main amp for the whole thing was a Divided by 13 BTR 23. A lot of it is actually just straight into the amp because I’d put a pedal on and be like ‘I kind of liked it when it was just its own,’ just turning up the gain up a little bit and then EQing it myself for each song. I had my amp in the little foyer room into the studio covered in blankets because it was so loud. So I just had the head next to me and the cab was in the other room so I could just kind of tweak as I went along with my board.”